code is the next universal language in
the 70s it was punk music that drove the
whole generation in the 80s it was
probably money but for my generation of
people software is the interface to our
imagination and our world and that means
that we need a radically radically more
diverse set of people to build those
products to not see computers as
mechanical and lonely and boring and
magic to see them as things that they
can tinker on and turn around and twist
and so forth my personal journey into
the world of programming and technology
started at the tender age of 14 I had
this mad teenage crush on an older man
and the older man in question just
happened to be the den vice president of
United States mr. Al Gore and I did what
every single teenage girl would want to
do I wanted to somehow express all of
this love so I built him a website it's
over here and in 2001 there was no PA
there was no tumblr there was no
Facebook there was no Pinterest so I
needed to learn to code in order to
express all of this longing and loving
and that is how programming started for
me it started as a mean of
self-expression just like when I was
smaller I would use crayons and Legos
and when I was older I would use guitar
lessons and theater of plays but then
there were other boys there were other
things to get excited about like poetry
and and knitting socks and and and
conjugating French irregular verbs and
coming up with make-believe worlds and
and Bern and Russell and his philosophy
and I started to be one of those people
who felt the computers are boring and
technical and lonely here's what I think
today little girls don't know that they
are not supposed to like computers
little girls are amazing they are really
really good at like concentrating on
things and and being exact and they ask
amazing questions like what and why and
how when what if and they
don't know that they are not supposed to
like computers it's the parents who do
it's as parents who feel like computer
science is this esoteric weird science
discipline that only belongs to the
mystery makers that is almost as far
removed from everyday life as they not
clear physics and they are partly right
about that there's a lot of syntax and
controls and data structures and
algorithms and practices protocols and
paradigms in programming and we as a
community we've made computers smaller
and smaller we've built layers and
layers of abstraction on top of each
other between the man and the machine to
the point that we no longer have any
idea how computers work or how to talk
to them and we do teach our kids how the
human body works we teach them how the
combustion engine functions and we even
tell them that if you want to really be
an astronaut you can become one but when
the kid comes to us and asks so what is
a bubble sort algorithm or how does the
computer know what happens when I press
play how does it know which video to
show up Linda is internet a place we
adults we grow utterly silent it's magic
some of us say it's too complicated the
others say well it's neither it's not
magic and it's not complicated it all
just happened really really really fast
computer scientists built these amazing
beautiful machines but they made them
very very foreign to us and also the
language we speak to the computer so
that we don't know how to speak to the
computers anymore
without our fancy user interfaces and
that's why no one recognized that when I
was conjugating French irregular verbs
I was actually practicing my pattern
recognition skills and when I was
excited about knitting
I actually was following a sequence of
symbolic commands that included loops
inside of them and the Bernard Russell's
lifelong quest to find an exact language
between English and mathematics found
its home inside of a computer I was a
programmer but no one knew it
the kids of today they tap swipe and
pinch their way through the world but
unless we give them tools to build with
computers
we are raising only consumers instead of
creators and I believe that if
javascript is the new lingua franca
instead of grammar lessons we should be
teaching poetry classes this whole quest
kind of led me to this little girl
hilary name is Ruby she is 6 years old
she's completely fearless imaginative a
little bit bossy and every time I would
run into a problem in trying to teach
myself programming like what is
object-oriented design or what is
garbage collection I would try to
imagine how a six-year-old little girl
would explain the problem and I wrote a
book about her and I Illustrated it and
the things Ruby told me go like this
Ruby taught me that you're not supposed
to be afraid of the bugs under your bed
and that even the biggest of the
problems are just a group of tiny
problems stuck together and Ruby also
she also introduced me to her friends
the sort of colorful side of the
internet culture she has friends like
the Snow Leopard who's beautiful but
doesn't want to play with the other kids
and she has friends like the green
robots that are really friendly but
super messy and she has friends like
Linux the penguin who's really
ruthlessly efficient but somewhat hard
to understand and idealistic foxes and
so on in Ruby's world you learn
technology through play and for instance
the computers are really good at
repeating stuff so the way Ruby would
teach loops goes like this this is
Ruby's favorite dance move it goes clap
clap stomp stomp clap clap and dance and
you learn for loops by o counter loops
by repeating the four times and you
learned while loops by repeating that
sequence while I'm standing on one leg
and uilleann until loops by repeating
that sequence until mom gets really mad
you learned their composition skills by
problem-solving flowcharts and seeing
what went wrong in Ruby's friends
practicalities you learn that algorithms
they are really much like cupcake
recipes and most of all you learn but
there
arno ready answers when coming up with
the curriculum for Ruby's world I needed
to really ask the kids how they see the
world and how what kind of questions
they have and I would organize
playtesting sessions and I would have
this I have three little stories for you
from those playtesting sessions so I
would start by showing the kids these
four pictures I would show them a
picture of a car a grocery store a dog
and a toilet and I would ask which one
of these do you think is a computer and
the kids would be very conservative and
go like hah none of these is a computer
I know what a computer is
it's the glowing books in front of which
mom or dad spends way too much time in
front of but then we would talk and we
would discover that actually a car is a
computer it has a navigation system
inside of it and a dog a dog might not
be a computer but it has a color and the
color might have a computer inside of it
and grocery stores they have so many
different kinds of computers like the
cashier system and the burglar alarms
and kids you know what in Japan toilets
our computers and there's even hackers
who like them and we go further and I
give them these little stickers with an
on/off button on them and I tell the
kids you know what today you have this
magic ability to make anything in this
room into your computer and again the
kids go sounds really hard I don't know
the right answer for this but I tell
them that don't worry your parents don't
know the right answer either they've
just started to hear about this thing
called the Internet of Things but here
kids you're going to be the ones who are
really going to live up in a world where
everything is a computer your washing
machine your toothbrush even your milk
bottle and that you're the last
generation that will remember the
computer as a glowing box and then I had
this little girl who came to me and took
a bicycle lamp and she said if this
bicycle life if it were a computer it
would change colors and I'm that's a
really good idea what else could it do
and she thinks and she thinks and she
goes ha if this bicycle lamp for a
computer we could go on a biking trip
with my father
and we would sleep in a tent and the
spicy biking lamp could also be a movie
projector and that's the moment I'm
looking for not the moment when the kid
writes the perfect Ruby ra the moment
when the kid realizes that the world is
definitely not ready yet
that a really awesome way of making the
world more ready is by doing by building
technology and that each one of us can
be a part of that change final story we
also built a computer the glowing box
the arcade glowing books and we get to
know the bossy CPU and the helpful ramen
room that helped it remember things and
after we've assembled our computer
together we also design an application
for it my favorite story is this little
boy he's six years old and his favorite
thing in the world is to be an astronaut
and the boy he has this huge headphones
on and he's completely immersed in his
tiny paper computer because you see he
still his own intergalactic planetary
navigation application and his father
the lone astronaut in the Martian orbit
is on the other side of the room and the
boy's important mission is to bring the
father safely back to earth and these
kids are going to have a profoundly
different view of the world and the way
we build it with technology finally the
more approachable the more inclusive and
the more diverse we make the world of
technology the more colorful and better
the world will look like because
disruption it doesn't start with
technology disruption starts with the
people with a vision and computer
science and programming and technology
the very DNA of all of these things is
humanity computers after all they used
to be humans where we who were really
really good at calculating things and
still today programmers they don't write
the code only for the machine to execute
they write the code for other
programmers to read and build upon so
imagine with me for a moment a world
where the stories we tell about how
things get made don't only include the
20-something year old Silicon Valley
voice
but also Kenyan schoolgirls and
Norwegian librarians imagine a world
where the little other Lovelace's of
tomorrow who live in the permanent
reality of ones and zeros they grow up
to be very optimistic and and brave
about technology day they embrace the
powers and the opportunities and the
limitations of the world a world of
technology that is wonderful whimsical
and a tiny bit weird when I was a girl I
wanted to be a storyteller I loved to
make-believe worlds and and my favorite
thing to do was to wake up in the
mornings in Moomin Valley in the
afternoons I would roam around the
tattoo winds and in the evenings I would
go to sleep in Narnia and programming
turned out to be the perfect profession
for me I still create worlds instead of
stories I do them with code programming
gives me this amazing power to build my
whole little universe with its own rules
and paradigms and practices create
something out of nothing with the pure
power of logic and that probably makes
me into a poet thank you
you